Vidyadhar Rajabhar's arrest can seal Hema Upadhyay double murder case
It has been twelve days since the bodies of artist Hema Upadhyay and her lawyer Harish Bhambhani were found stuffed in wooden boxes, abandoned in a suburban sewer. Immediately after the murders came to light, four men, all employees of a fabrication workshop owner, were placed under arrest. Hema’s estranged husband, Chintan Upadhyay was arrested too, on charges of plotting the crime. But the main suspect, Vidyadhar Rajbhar, who is alleged to have taken the “contract” of orchestrating the murders, still remains elusive. And with his phone perpetually unreachable, he is seemingly off the cop radar.
Soon after the bodies were discovered, the cops knew of Vidyadhar’s role. The police had zeroed in on a tempo driver, who claimed that he had transported the bodies to the drain, assuming that the cardboard coffins contained waste sculptures. The boxes, the driver said, had been given to him by Vidyadhar. The cops started gathering information about the relationship between the workshop owner and the deceased. They learnt that Vidyadhar had lured Hema into meeting him by saying that he had some incriminating information against Chintan, and it was his workshop where the two were killed. He clearly appeared guilty.
As is a first in the investigation of any crime, the cops started tracking Vidyadhar’s cell phone. But it was off. Interrogations with his family revealed that he was using his wife’s phone. The cops approached the network provider, and started tapping the call data records of this number. Since he had spoken to somebody over the phone at Dadar railway station, the cops knew he was at Dadar. A day after the bodies were found, he attended a call at Itarsi railway station in Madhya Pradesh, and the cops derived that he was fleeing to his hometown in Varanasi. But when the cops reached Varanasi, he wasn’t there. A day later, his location was Bhusawal in Maharashtra. But the cops couldn’t find him there either. Days of wait and surveillance have yielded nothing. Meanwhile, Vidyadhar’s phone remains switched off and his location, unknown.
"He has been a step ahead of us throughout the whole crime. He used chloroform napkins to make his victims lose consciousness, so that he wouldn’t have to use a murder weapon. That’s one piece of evidence less. And we suspect that he was in the city, watching the bodies being pulled out, and fled immediately after they were found. He was a step ahead again since he put his phone off. He knew that the first thing we would do is trace him through his phone. Even with his wife’s phone, he has made minimal calls, giving us limited, even inconsequential information about his whereabouts. And now, with even that phone off, he is even difficult to trace,” said an officer from the Mumbai police, who does not wish to be named.
The police, when tracing an accused, usually first activate their informers' network in order to get details on the person’s identity. If he has a criminal past, he is easier to find since such men are usually known to informers, who are mostly criminals themselves. But in this case, the cops couldn’t get more information on the workshop owner. They traced his family to Charkop in Kandivli (West), but he wasn’t home either. They sent a team to his workshop, to his hometown, but he couldn’t be found. And the only respite in such cases, the criminal’s cell phone, was off.
“Of course the cops are extremely dependent on cell phone tracking. Earlier, we only had our informants when we had to track criminals. The investigations were largely based on human intelligence sources. Then there was asset tracking, where we kept the vehicles and bank transactions of such people under surveillance. But with the advance of technology in the past decade, cell phone tracking has become a widely-used method of technical surveillance. Plus, cell phone tracking is extremely simple, and it gives you specific information about the place where an accused is, as soon as he answers a call,” says a police official.
MN Singh, former city police commissioner says that investigation, which is an elaborate and analytical process, is often hampered because the wanted men keep a tab over the police’s movements through television and newspaper reports. “All these fellows follow the news reports around their crimes when they’re on the run. That keeps them updated, helps them plan their own movements. Even various tricks like putting the phone off, they have learnt through the media, through films and true crime serials. But I’m confident that Vidyadhar will be arrested. Once an accused is identified, we will get him sooner or later,” said Singh.
According to sources in the Mumbai police, the delay in Vidyadhar's arrest can also be attributed to the long-standing rivalry between the local police in the city and the Mumbai crime branch. In the initial days of the investigations, the crime branch was interrogating Chintan while the local police had arrested the four suspects. Both investigating agencies, sources said, had no access to each other’s suspects, preventing a holistic approach to the investigations.
“The rivalry between the two police wings here is an undocumented legend,” says a journalist. “The competition is basically a race to faster detections, and the two wings usually try hard to outdo each other. For example, the local police had once arrested a man in a murder case. It was an important crime, a renowned confectionary shop owner was killed. The crime branch went to the local police station to question him, but the local police, in order to avoid access to the accused, locked the murderer in the police station bathroom for several hours, and told them that he wasn’t picked up. They discreetly produced him in court later, and got his custody. So this competitive madness has been lurking around for a long time. Everybody, especially the senior cops, know that the investigations suffer, complainants and witnesses are torn between the two wings, but that isn’t as important as getting detections.”
Sources in the Mumbai police say that they believe that Vidyadhar will be traced soon. “He only has a few thousands of rupees with him; he will soon run out of money and get in touch with his family, friends or relatives for help. We have all of them covered. Further, a man can’t stay without getting in touch with his family for too long. And Vidyadhar’s wife gave birth to a baby girl only two months ago. I don’t see how long he can stay away from them. It’ll be a few days, weeks or months, but he’ll either be tracked or will surrender,” says an officer privy to the investigations.
Vidyadhar’s arrest is extremely crucial to the case. It is Vidyadhar who is alleged to have committed the murders with help from his four employees. It is he who can help the cops establish the guilt of the four suspects and that of Chintan, the only one who can help them piece the puzzle of sequence in the crime. The cops better get him soon because twelve days have passed already, the trail appears to be getting colder, and without this important link, the chain of evidence in the case is likely to snap.